Turnbull threw away the Lib’s best election strategy in the last election and almost lost. He couldn’t run a carbon tax scare like Abbott had (or Trump did even moreso). Now he can’t run a cheap electricity campaign in a nation where wallets are bleeding from power bills. It would be a gift campaign to mock the idea that wind and solar make prices cheaper — that’s a bubble desperate to be popped. But Malcolm’s campaign (if he survives that long) is a Santa tricky plan to have it all — lower emissions, lower prices, and more stability. And if you’ll believe that…
He’s leaving his entire right flank open, unguarded.
A few dismal facts that won’t go away:
- Malcolm’s NEG plan to reduce electricity prices aims pathetically low ($2 a week) and will fail anyway. The country already knows that.
- The world still awaits the glorious discovery of a single nation powered by lots of wind and solar that has cheap electricity.
- Australia’s 1.5% of global carbon emissions are irrelevant. Australia may be the only nation on Earth that is even trying to meet the Paris accord.
- More than half of Australians don’t buy the blame for the climate. Who speaks for them?
Today’s Sydney Morning Herald Readers Panel quiz asks if people believe the main promise behind the “Game Changer”:
Do you feel confident that the Prime Minister’s energy policy will cut electricity bills?”.
- The responses: Yes: 9%
- Don’t know: 16%
- No: 75%
So people who believe in the magical power of windmills and solar panels don’t believe his plan will work. Those who understand reality also know his plan won’t work. That leaves Turnbull reaching the 20 people in between these two groups who all appear to be columnists in the media: Paul Kelly, Paul Maley, Dennis Shanahan. Not fooled, McCrann, Bolt, Blair, and most of Australia.
Malcolm Turnbull and Josh Frydenberg have made a deliberate decision to lose the next election and to lose it badly. The government woke up to the reality that a 43 per cent clean energy target would be all-but indistinguishable to Labor’s (insane) 50 per cent renewable energy target. But it then opted for something even more opaque. And, $2 a week off your power bill, in 10 years, maybe, doesn’t really seal the deal.
The Liberals instead backed Turnbull as he smashed their last hope with a plan that is boring, incomprehensible, backed by no credible modelling and – even on its own terms – will not cut power prices for a decade, and even then by just $2 a week on the average bill.
That plan will be even deader once Labor realises its best attack on this dud is simply to describe it as it actually is – just another plan to cut emissions – and then to argue it’s not as good as their own plan to do exactly the same. Already Labor is moving to this better attack.
In WA, the unskeptical pandering conservatives were crushed at the last election.
Delcons still matter — a million defiant non-left voters were “most influential group” in 2016 Australian election.
h/t David B.
See past posts:
- Delcons: Might be a million votes that don’t matter
- Turnbull killed off the best campaign issue for the Coalition — the carbon tax